DIAMOND ATELIER SMASHES THE MOLD WITH A RADICAL XSR900

Motorcycle styling, even in the custom scene, tends to edge forward in increments. Bikes fit neatly within genres, perhaps stretching the envelope in one direction but playing safe in others.

But occasionally someone will try something completely new. And so it is with this groundbreaking design from Diamond Atelier, the Munich workshop famous for its immaculate BMW airhead customs.

It’s a Yamaha XSR900 built for the Dutch watchmaker TW Steel and called ‘Æon.’ And yes, there’s a huge gap where you’d normally expect to see a tank.

Diamond’s Tom Konecny takes up the story: “We’d never ridden, let alone built a XSR900 before, so there was a moment of silence when the Yamaha courier dropped off the brand new bike. But we quickly spotted the most striking feature of the XSR900: the organic shape of the frame hugging the three-cylinder engine.”

“Today’s bikes are packed with electronics and things like secondary air systems, ABS pumps and the like—so our goal was to reduce the XSR900 to the bare minimum. We wanted to ‘unclutter’ it as much as possible, to expose the real core of a 2017 production bike.”

There’s definitely a skeletal look to Æon, with the engine exposed—in much the same way as the mechanism of a mechanical watch might be revealed. The design comes from Diamond Atelier collaborator Julian Weber, and is influenced by current custom car trends in Japan.